The Annual Controversy Over the Webby Awards

Jimmy Fallon, who cultivated an Internet following with online video clips, Twitter and interviews with Diggnation hosts, snagged the Webby Awards’s “Person of the Year.”

The Webbys honor “excellence on the Internet,” including Web sites, advertising and video. The winners, who are famously only allowed to give an acceptance speech of five words, will be honored by “Saturday Night Life” cast member Seth Myers on June 8 (and true to form, Mr. Fallon has turned to his Twitter feed to ask his followers what those five words should be).

Twitter won the award for Breakout of the Year, in honor of its exponential growth among celebrities, businesses, and average Joes alike.

Not everyone sees the awards as a legitimate marker of Internet excellence. Soon-to-depart Valleywagger Owen Thomas called the Webbys a “scam,” writing that “among the inside crowd, the Webby Awards were always a joke, a masquerade where Internet fanboys and fangirls played dress-up and feigned the red-carpet rituals of Hollywood’s real ceremonies.”

He added: “Somewhere along the way, the organizers figured out that this goofy charade could be milked for profit. And now that mainstream entertainers like Jimmy Fallon and Seth McFarlane are sweeping this year’s awards, the parodic circle is complete.”

On Waxy.org, Andy Baio pointed out that the number of Webby categories have quadrupled over the last five years. With entries at $275 a pop for the Web categories and $195 for film, the whole thing is a way to “milk the Internet’s lust for self-promotion,” Valleywag’s Mr. Thomas wrote.

Webby complaints aren’t new. Last year, Slate columnist Jack Shafer bemoaned the category proliferation and the number of honorees per category, saying “If there is a less exclusive award on the planet, I’ve yet to hear of it.”

In a statement, David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards, responded to some of the criticism. “When the Webby Awards debuted in 1996 with 15 categories, there were only about 23 million Internet users world-wide. Today, there are 1.5 billion. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Webby Awards’ growth has closely mirrored the Internet’s evolution.”

In response to the awards’ exclusivity, he said that the judging process is audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and that 248 works, a little more than 2%, of the more than 10,000 entries received a Webby. The entry fees “provide the best and most sustainable model for ensuring that our judging process remains consistent and rigorous and is not dependent on things like sponsorships that can fluctuate from year to year,” he added.